WHEN HE CAME INTO OFFICE IN 1977, HOW DID HE ASSESS THE VULNERABILITY OF OUR ICBMS AT THAT TIME?

In 1977 our perception at least of the ICBM was that they were relatively invulnerable to attack. That is, we knew that in time they would become vulnerable to attack. They were intended to achieve their invulnerability to attack by putting them in silos which were concrete with reinforced steel, and silos themselves cannot protect the missile from a direct hit from a nuclear bomb. There is no amount of steel and no amount of concrete that can protect against a direct hit. But in 1977 the accuracy of all ICBMs, and particularly the accuracy of the Soviet ICBMs was sufficiently poor that they wouldn't be making direct hits. There would be near misses, and the misses would be sufficiently far away that in a high percentage of the cases the missiles would be protected by their silos. At that time, we were working on the design of ICBMs with greatly improved accuracy. So we knew that it was possible to build missiles that had accuracies sufficient to threaten missiles that were in ICBM silos. But we did not believe that the Soviets had that kind of technology.

HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT SEEN THEN FOR US TO IMPROVE OUR ACCURACY?

There were two different thrusts toward improving the accuracy of ICBMs and all missiles. One was there was a perceived requirement by the military to attack hardened military targets, and the recognition that improved accuracy was necessary to do that. There was a much greater payoff from improved accuracy than there was in putting bigger bombs on the missiles. So that was one thrust. The other thrust was simply the technological imperative. That is, technology was improving. It was possible to make them more accurate. And for whatever level of missile force you had, they were much more effective if they were more accurate. Or to put it another way, at a given level of accuracy, was it possible to accomplish a given military mission with fewer missiles if they were accurate missiles. So you... it not only was possible to do it, it was pretty clear that it was cost effective to make the missiles more accurate and that you could get by with fewer missiles.

WHAT WAS IMPORTANT NEED IN ICBM FORCES AT THAT TIME?

The MX had indeed two different, two major improvements over the Minuteman. The first was that it was substantially more accurate than the Minuteman and the second is that it was conceived that it would be deployed in a... at that time they were considering a tunnel deployment, which would make it very difficult to attack. So it was improvements both in accuracy and in vulnerability. And it was hard to say which of those was considered to be more important. Some people working on the development, some people in the military, thought the accuracy improvement was a significant improvement in the MX, and others thought the vulnerability was more important. But at that time the vulnerability issue was viewed as an academic issue because we were quite convinced that the Soviets did not have missiles of sufficient accuracy to threaten even our Minuteman much less the MX.

ASKS ABOUT MCINTYRE AND SMITH WORKING TO BASE THIS SURVIVABLY. DID HE WORK WITH THAT COMMITTEE?

The Senate Armed Services Committee was not only the obvious. Had an obvious statutory responsibility for weapon procurement, but in the, a person of Sen. McIntyre and Larry Smith, they had a strong personal interest and a substantial knowledge of the problems. They had a... they had reached the conclusion that vulnerability was soon to become an important issue with the ICBM, and that the MX therefore ought to be focused on the vulnerability issue. That is that the MX ought to be defined as the replacement for the Minuteman which would solve the emerging vulnerability problem.

DID THEY EXPRESS HOSTILITY, RESISTANCE TO THE IDEA THAT WE NEED IMPROVED ACCURACY?

I don't know that, I never sensed that they, that they were actively hostile to improving the missile in other ways besides vulnerability. Only that they wanted to emphasize that the primary reason for going to a new missile at all was to address this emerging vulnerability problem.

WHY WAS HE MORE CONCERNED WITH THIS?

Well I first reviewed the MX development program as it stood them. It was in a very early phase of development in 1977. Both from the point of view of its technical feasibility and the requirements for it. And my first impression was that the technical approach that was being used to deal with vulnerability was probably inadequate. They were planning at that time to build large tunnels underground, have the missile on a track which moved back and forth in the tunnels, and thereby creating uncertainties as to location. Not only was that apt to be a very expensive way to deploy the missile, but we were concerned that if a bomb landed anywhere along the length of that tunnel, that the tunnel might channel the destructive effects of the, the bomb, down the tunnel, and thereby not accomplishing the purposes it hoped to accomplish. So we were concerned from the first with the technical problem, with the approach. But at that time it seemed to me that we had plenty of time to solve the technical problem because we did not believe, I did not believe, nor did the intelligence estimates support a belief, that there was any near term threat to the missile as it was deployed in silos. There was no near term threat to the Minuteman missile. In... late '77, I believe it was, we received intelligence information that the Soviets had begun development on a modification to their largest ICBM which we called the SS-18. And the evidence suggested that this modification was to make about a two-fold increase in accuracy in the missile. And that that would achieve a level of accuracy with the size of the warhead on that missile which could indeed pose a substantial threat to our missiles in their silos. And so that took the vulnerability issue from the back burner and moved it up to the front burner.

ASKS FOR REACTION TO THIS EVENT.

Well this new intelligence data, these new intelligence data, did produce a sense of urgency. Because prior to that we had thought that the soonest this threat would appear would be with the next generation of Soviet ICBMs. And if you calculate their ordinary developmental cycle for a brand new missile, that meant that the threat was at least 10 to 15 years in the future. Even for initial deployment of the threat. What we saw instead was a modification to an existing missile, which was already deployed. And that meant that they had the potential of being able to deploy this modification in maybe a half to a third of that time. And so it suggests that the threat may be on us in four or five years instead of ten or fifteen. And in the meantime, our MX missile, which was presumably the solution to that problem, was in its very early stages of development. It was probably at best seven or eight years away from deployment as we thought in '77, although that turned out to be optimistic. And moreover, we were not satisfied that we even had a technical solution to the problem in '77.

WHAT WAS HIS RESPONSE TO THREAT?

A response...my personal response was first of all to be sure that the Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, and the President were not only aware of this new information, but were aware of the significance of it relative to our Minuteman missiles and relative to the MX missile and in particular aware that we were in a very early stage of development of MX, and may even have an unsatisfactory design. So, the first action was to simply make them aware of the problem and to suggest that the minimum action that we needed on our part was to accelerate the design effort on the MX to be sure that we could find a satisfactory technical solution to the vulnerability problem.

CARTER AND BROWN DID NOT WANT TO RUSH AHEAD WITH MX AT BEGINNING. HOW DID THEIR MINDS CHANGE?

I don't believe any of us in the office of the Secretary of Defense or for that matter many people in the Air Force believed in 1977 there was any urgency to the moving ahead with the MX missile. For reasons that I've already described. But we, I believed, and I... think that Harold Brown and the President both came to believe also that this information about the Soviet development put quite a different light on the matter. And that it was important to get on with a solution to this potential vulnerability problem. Now the MX was not necessarily the only way of solving that problem. But it was the program that was already underway which was at least putatively addressed to this problem. And therefore it became the focus of our attention.

WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE SOLVED IT?

Well there was considered then and there is still considered today, that if you are concerned with a strategic retaliatory missile's being vulnerable, that you could place a greater dependence on the submarine missiles, which were not then and are not today vulnerable to attack. And so, from the beginning, there was the consideration of simply accepting the vulnerability of our land-based missiles and placing more of an emphasis and a much greater priority on our sea-based missiles. So that was always an alternative solution to the problem which was considered.

WHY WAS THAT NEVER REALLY ACCEPTED, THAT LAND-BASED MISSILES WOULD NEVER BE COMPLETELY SURVIVABLE? WHY NOT GIVE UP THAT LEG OF THE TRIAD?

Well, there are several reasons advanced for that. There are several reasons advanced but not simply depending on submarine missiles. Which I find correct but not compelling. And there's one reason which I find compelling. Let me cover first of all the correct but not compelling reasons. It is, it was pointed out that the submarine missiles, particularly in 1977 were substantially less accurate than ICBMs. Also that the ability to communicate with missiles in submarines is much more tenuous than communicating with missiles based in the continental United States. And so there are those two very real differences between submarine missiles and silo-based missiles. And to some people those differences, are important differences and they think that we ought to retain the different character of a missile which is obtained by an ICBM. As I say, I find those reasons interesting but not compelling. And they become less compelling as time goes on and as technology advances. Indeed, the Trident II missile which we're developing today, looks, acts and smells like an ICBM except we launch it from a submarine. It has ... essentially equivalent accuracy to an MX missile. We have improved communication systems with submarines today over what we had in 1977, and they could be improved further. So while those are differences they are in my judgment, not distinctive differences. The compelling reason, if there is a compelling reason for maintaining the ICBMs is to increase the difficulty of any attacking force in attacking your strategic missiles. All of this gets to the question of what the missiles are there for in the first place. Which is deterrence of attack. And one can believe, and I do believe, that our submarine-based missiles are a very powerful deterrent in themselves to an attack. And as they are improved with the addition of the Trident II missiles, they become, that argument becomes even stronger. And so the question is, why does one need to strengthen that deterrent with another force? This, this ended, this turned out to be the pivotal, the pivotal issue which we discussed within the Defense Department and between the Defense Department and the President. And I would say the pivotal argument for proceeding with the MX, was that when it com... when the President asked Harold Brown and asked myself the critical question, which is can you assure me that not just today but ten years in the future, or twenty years in the future, that the submarines will be as vulnerable to attack as they are today? The answer was no. We could not assure him of that. We could give him a very high confidence that they were invulnerable to attack for the next five years and probably even up to ten years. But beyond that time horizon our ability to predict what the Soviets might discover in anti-submarine warfare and submarine detection techniques. It was really getting beyond our ability to forecast. So, we ... the President then perceived the specter that if he then narrowed his strategic forces down to simply to submarines, and then if the Soviets were to make a breakthrough in submarine detection, so that the submarines could now be discovered at sea, now you have the most vulnerable system of all. Because there is nothing more vulnerable than the submarine if you know where it is. It can be attacked very effectively and very simply and very ... with a very few missiles. And if you attack it you're not just destroying one missile, you're destroying a whole complement of missiles. If you're destroying a few hundred warheads, at once. So it's a very attractive target and if the Soviets ever learned how to detect submarines at sea it would be very, very vulnerable target. So the argument came down to how long we could confidently predict that submarines could not be detected and no one could say with confidence more than about ten years. It's been almost ten years since this debate was taking place. It's now, as I say, ten years later. And we, I still feel today, I still have the same confidence in the vulnerability of the submarines that I had...invulnerability of the submarines that I had then. And I still think I can forecast that about ten more years in the future. But ten years ago I could not have predicted twenty years in the future which was what was needed to be done. To add to the complication one more factor, and that is...

ASKS ROLE OF HIGHLY ACCURATE, HARD TARGET, PROMPT RESPONSE MISSILES IN OUR ARSENAL?

In... Our nuclear missiles first of all are there to deter an attack, as I said. And when you start trying to decide what kind of an attack you're trying to deter and how you would respond to an attack, then you can get a more sophisticated view of the problem than simply saying that if you have so many warheads you can deliver to the Soviet Union that you can deter an attack. The... the basic targeting question of missiles is, you know, in deterrence is, is it sufficient or even moral to target them only at civilian targets, cities. In which case, if that was your idea of deterrence, you could get by with a relatively few inaccurate missiles. Or, to really achieve the highest quality deterrence, is it necessary to target military targets, which typically are hardened, dispersed, more difficult to attack, and it takes many more missiles, and it takes accurate missiles. Also, they may be mobile, ... and therefore it may take a rapid response. And so as you start to broaden your concept of deterrence, to say that to have an effective deterrence I have to be able to threaten to attack, the Soviet military targets, their ICBM shelters, their command and control bunkers. Then you develop a requirement, I mean to the ex... to the extent you believe that and you include that in your... in your targeting philosophy for deterrence, then you develop a requirement for many more warheads and much more accurate warheads. And all of those tend to push the deterrence force into having more warheads, accurate warheads, and deployed in ICBMs instead of fewer, smaller warheads.

ASKS ROLE OF NEED TO HAVE HARDWARE AROUND THEM, AS SCHLESINGER HAD DEVELOPED, IN CARTER ADMINISTRATION'S DECISION TO GO AHEAD WITH MX?

There were many different points of view on why we should go ahead with an MX during the Carter Administration. The dominant view was that we had to have a replacement for the Minuteman missile which was not as vulnerable to attack as was the Minuteman. The MX did other things besides reducing vulnerability. It also provided a more accurate missile than the Minuteman but we could have provided an accurate version of the Minuteman much more cheaply than we could have provided an MX system. We could have done the same thing that the Soviets did. We could have upgraded the guidance system on the Minuteman just as they upgraded the guidance system on the SS-18.And that would have been a fraction of the cost of putting in the MX. The reason we proceeded with the MX program was we were trying to deal with the vulnerability and at least in the Carter Administration it was conceived that this was are placement for the Minuteman and probably would be done on a warhead for warhead replacement basis, instead of being additive to the warheads in the ICBM force. So we were not conceiving it as a ... as a particularly relevant to the question, to the question that some people were concerned with, is how do you improve and how do you get more targeting against more targets and harder targets.

VAN CLEAVE SAYS HE SUGGESTS WE DO THAT, MAKE MINUTEMEN MORE ACCURATE.

Van Cleave and others proposed the Minuteman alternative to the MX and depending on whether people thought improved accuracy was a more important component of the MX or reduced vulnerability was more important, they would emphasize a new guidance system, or they would emphasize the mobility. If all we were trying to do was improve the accuracy it could have been done much more cheaply and much more effectively by improving the accuracy on the Minuteman missile. Basically putting an MX type guidance system in the Minuteman. The, on the other hand, if we were dealing with vulnerability we had to make the Minuteman a mobile missile, and that was seriously looked at. They were careful engineering studies made of what would be required to do that. It could, it was not a cheap program as some people believed. To really get the reduced vulnerability with the greatly increased mobility. But it was still cheaper than an MX program. The problem with that equation of cost though, was that it still was a very expensive program and by the time you had invested all of this money in the Minuteman upgrade, I don't remember the exact numbers but maybe two-thirds the cost of an MX, you had invested in a missile in which the chemicals themselves were starting to deteriorate. By the time the whole improvement program is done. And so what you would have effectively done was you would have had a Minuteman except for the launch system, except for the guidance system, and except for the rockets on it. In short, you would have jacked up the nameplate and moved a whole new missile in. By the time all of that was done, it would have been as expensive as the MX. So the thought that this could be done more cheaply than the MX, simply didn't take sufficient cognizance of the fact that by the time the guidance in the launching program improvements were completed, one would also have to replace the rockets.

CITES RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SMALLER MISSILE THAT WOULD BE EASIER TO MAKE MOBILE. WHY DID THE DESIGN FOR THE MISSILE NEVER CHANGE?

That's true. There were many advisers who were recommending a smaller missile. I myself was proposing a smaller missile. And my choice for the missile was the Trident II missile. I thought it was plenty big enough to do what we wanted to do. It had the further advantage, it would require only one development program instead of two. And because it was smaller, it, you could deal much more effectively with the question of making it mobile. So there were a whole host of technical arguments for making the MX smaller than the roughly 200,000 pound missile which in fact it turned out to be. None of those arguments, no one of those arguments was compelling. I found the aggregation of them to be in my judgment compelling, and so presented the argument that way. I basically, without going into a lot of detail, and I lost that argument. And in the final decision, the Air Force proposal to go for the full-size MX missile prevailed. It is hard to say what was the final, what led to the final judgment factor in the President's mind on that. It seems clear that there was at least a psychological, or a political argument advanced that in the perception of military strength, we were at a perceptual disadvantage because the Soviet missiles were clearly and obviously bigger than ours. I mean, the SS-18 was twice as big as an MX missile and that made it 3 or 4 times the size of the Trident. Now, as I say, that was purely a... psychological, political argument, because what mattered was not the size of the missile, but the size and the accuracy of the warheads that were being delivered by the missile. And the MX even in the small version which we envision had the same accuracy, the same striking power with a warhead on it, as, as the bigger version of the MX. So that was a, that was a contentious issue. It was... it was part of the argument, part of the debate for about six months. And the decision was finally made by the President to go for the larger missile and the explicit reasons why he made that decision instead of accepting the smaller proposal were never completely clear to me.

BUT YOU AND HAROLD BROWN PUSHED CARTER FOR THE SMALL MISSILE?

I pushed for the smaller missile. I know Harold was leaning favorably to it, but also I could see the argument on the other side. And I can't speak for him as to how he finally came out on that issue.

ASKS HIS ROLE IN IT.

Brzezinski was a strong supporter of big missiles.

DISCUSS

The debate that the President listened to on the subject of the size of the missile was basically my presenting an argument for the smaller missile and Brzezinski arguing for the larger missile. On a political, on the grounds of the perception, political perception issue. It's hard, as I said, it's hard to say how the President, what he weighed into mind when he made his judgment, but in the last analysis he came down in favor of the Air Force proposal which was to go for the larger missile.

CITES CRITICISM CARTER FACED AT THAT TIME. PERHAPS BIGGER MISSILE WAS A DOMESTIC BARGAINING CHIP TO GAIN SUPPORT FOR SALT?

Well. I'll say this about the big missile, little missile debate. Is that I don't think, I didn't think... then and I don't think now it was a terribly important argument. It was an argument at the margin. On the margin I thought then and still think today that the smaller missile was better. Primarily because we were making it mobile. And the advantages of the small missile in a mobile deployment are not insignificant. Probably the... I have always believed but I couldn't prove that the biggest factor that led to the big missile argument was the anti-wimp factor. Which is that it seemed like a wimpy thing to do to build such a little bitty missile when the Soviets had the big manly missiles. And so that always, it is hard to believe it didn't have something to do with the final decision. But as I said, it really wasn't in the last analysis a... a swinging factor one way or the other, no matter how that decision was made. It probably would have been a marginal advantage, technical advantage in going with a smaller missile.

AT THAT TIME THERE WAS HEAVY SUPPORT FOR TUNNEL BASING. WHAT TURNED HIM AGAINST IT?

When I first reviewed the MX program in about mid-'77, the basing mode that was being pursued was the tunnel-basing mode. I don't, I don't think it was fair to say that the Air Force was... completely sold or convinced that this was the right approach. But the program was in the very early stages of development then. But that is the system that they, that was their baseline system. It was the one they were proceeding on. There were a number of objections, problems raised with that. The most, the most telling argument, I think was made by ... a panel that Frank Presit convened, I can't remember now all the people who were on that. But I think Dick Garwin was one of the people, in a group of physicists basically. Who came down very hard on an issue which we had suspected might be a problem which was the...that the shock wave would be carried down the tunnel. The tunnel would in effect act as a, as a conduit for carrying the shock wave down. And that therefore the... the fact that the missile was at the other end of the tunnel would not necessarily preserve it from attack. They went through the whole series of calculations which made it seem highly likely that indeed that tunneling effect would occur, it would be a substantial problem. And on that basis I directed the Air Force to look at, to drop the tunneling approach, and to develop alternative approaches. At the same time convened a defense science board task force to study alternative basing approaches and to make a recommendation. And in a matter of a relatively few months they started converging on an approach which came to be called multiple protective shelter. Which was simply to build a number of silos for each missile and then in a convert way move the missile from silo to silo so that the Soviets would never know presumably which silo to attack. So that way you in effect from a defense point of view you de-MIRVed the missile. If the missile had ten warheads on it, it was an attractive target because it could be attacked by only one warhead. But it we now took the missile and put it in ten different silos you still had ten aiming points for ten warheads and therefore one aiming point for a warhead. Therefore it became an unattractive target. And that meant that you got the, presumably got the cost efficiency of the MIRVed missiles without the instabilities that went with it. Instability in this case being that you have a target which essentially invites attack. So, what we found then was that since the tunneling system was not effective, that we started converging on the multiple protective shelter. Putting one missile, deploying one missile in one of ten or even twenty shelters so that it would be difficult to attack. Its vulnerability then would not be determined by how many missiles you had deployed but by how many silos or how many shelters you were willing to build.

THE PANELS RECOMMENDING THAT HAD A CONCEPT OF AN AUSTERE, VERTICAL, NUMEROUS SHELTERS, THAT WOULD BE CHEAP. HOW DID THAT GET CHANGED TO HORIZONTAL MODE THAT WAS ACCEPTED?

The, the Defense Science Board Task Force came, after looking at many alternatives, came to a very specific recommendation. And it was that the MX be deployed in silos but that there be many silos, ten or twenty silos built for each MX missile. The silos themselves would not be super hardened silos. They would be built as cheaply as we could build silos. But...you would, what determined how much concrete and steel you put in them was not that you were trying to protect the missile that was in that silo. You were just trying to keep a neighboring silo from being destroyed when one was hit. So that meant you could build the silos relatively cheaply and you could build lots of them. And you'd get your vulnerability then, or your invulnerability then, by building lots of silos. That was the Defense Science Board proposal. It was made to me about a year or so, I think, after we first discovered the vulnerability problem and started working on this issue seriously. And I thought that was a good proposal and I basically took that proposal forward to the, to the secretary, and to the White House.

REPEATS QUESTION ABOUT WHY VERTICAL SHELTER CONCEPT WAS REJECTED FOR MORE EXPENSIVE, COMPLICATED HORIZONTAL CONCEPT.

Once we had the Defense Science Board recommendation I discussed it. It seemed like a good recommendation to me. I discussed it with the White House, and with the Secretary's office, and with the arms control agency. And they pointed out, they were, that it would be very unlikely that they could get a... a verification regime that would be suitable for that. That it would not be really possible for the Soviets to know how many missiles we had deployed. That for the very reasons that they couldn't target the missiles, they also couldn't verify how many we had deployed. The question then they were raising was how could you devise a system which made it impossible to attack the missile on the one hand, but on the other hand made it possible for the Soviets to verify how many missiles we had. We were willing to let them know how many missiles we had, precisely. We just didn't want them to know which one of the silos had the missiles in it. So we... they believed we were on the horns of a dilemma and effectively rejected that proposal. That was done in informal discussions and never got forward, never got as far as a formal proposal. But basically I was asked to go back and look at alternatives which accomplished the, which had the invulnerability characteristics of the, of the multiple silos, but there was more likely to be verifiable in a treaty regime. At the same time the same panel which had discovered the same President's panel, Dr. Prest's panel, that had done the work on the vulnerability of the tunnels, came forward with a proposal to put the missiles in airplanes. So we proceeded then to look at alternatives to the silo-based MX. With two major concepts in mind. One of them was keeping the basic concept of the silo-based proposal, but turning the silos over so they were horizontal instead of vertical, and making it so that they were much easier to verify them from overhead reconnaissance, particularly to verify from Soviet satellites. That was the one alternative and the other alternative was to look seriously at the idea of basing the missiles in airplanes. So... two studies proceeded more or less in parallel. We concluded...and there again, all of these studies were... they were looking on the one hand by a Defense Science Board Task Force, by a President's Scientific Task Force, and by the Air Force themselves. But the bulk of the work was done by the Air Force ballistic systems division that's in San Bernadino. And they were the... over a period of several years they went through perhaps four or five detailed alternative designs for basing for the MX. At this particular time, we were then looking at these two alternatives. We concluded and after very detailed investigation, that the airplane basing would be too expensive and too complex. That was the conclusion which I believe the people on Frank Presser's panel who had proposed that never quite accepted. But that was a strong conclusion by the... that came out of the Air Force. And my office at least, in evaluating their study, believed that that was the correct conclusion. It wasn't that the air-borne basing was infeasible. It was just too expensive, too complex. At the same time the alternative of taking... basically taking the missiles and silo and putting them on their side, in horizontal shelters which acted like silos except that they were on their side, seemed to be an adequate solution to the problem. From a verification point of view, the virtue of putting them on their side, you'd design them with sort of a... with a roof that could slide off and one could periodically open the roof, and let the Soviets see that in a given complex at least, of 20 silos or 20 shelters, that there was only one missile. And you could imagine a sort of a verification, a cooperative verification system where... on a given day or even on demand you would open the roofs of some of these silos so that they could, some of these shelters so that the Soviets could determine the fact that we had no more missiles than we said we had.

IT WAS THEN ATTACKED FOR BEING DESIGNED FOR THE SOVIETS, FOR ARMED CONTROL AND IT'S CUMBERSOME AND EXPENSIVE. HOW DID YOU RESPOND?

Well it sort of suffered from two different problems. One of which is the wimp factor. It seemed like a wimpy thing to do to let the other side see your missiles. It would be, somehow you'd just sort of like to stick it to them and not show them your missiles. So I think there was that problem. I don't think that was a widely felt view but it was a view of some people. And the other one is that it suffered from the giggle factor. I mean the whole idea, it just sounded so complex and complicated. It wasn't complex or complicated to build the system. But to devise the operational scheme by which you moved the missiles from one shelter to another and assured the protection and opened the roof when you had to open it, all of the... all of it envisioned a very complicated operational scheme. There again it wouldn't have been too difficult to either build it or do it, but to explain to people what you were doing subjected you immediately to what we came to call the giggle factor. It just seemed like a kind of a silly thing to do. And so that... for that reason we had a hard time I think developing any substantial support for that missile. That is, every time, when we proposed that one, this time now we made a formal proposal ... to the White House, that this was what we wanted to do. There was a substantial resistance and the answer to that system or the response to that system, was really the response to every, every MX basing scheme that's ever been made is there must be a better way, go back and find it. So we thrashed around for maybe another six months. Looking at alternatives schemes and if that one was Rube Goldberg, you should have seen some of the other schemes we looked at. But this time we dug in our heels and came back and said no, this is the right way to do it. This is the best we can do. And if we want to have, if it's really important to our national security, having invulnerable ICBM systems, this is the way to do it. And called for a meeting of the National Security Council on the subject. Got the meeting, and to make a long story short, it was approved. But this whole debate in design and redesign and redesign went on now for, I don't know, three years I guess. It was a long and agonizing sequence. It was all designed to arrive at a way of keeping the ICBMs in the force but to keep them so that they had some reasonable probability of surviving a surprise attack, and therefore presumably so that they would not encourage a surprise attack. And therefore to maintain, continue to maintain the deterrence in the face of the improved accuracy of the Soviet missiles. And it was then and now the only alternative that anybody has been able to think of, short of essentially giving up on trying to make the ICBMs invulnerable from attack. And placing your primary dependence on the submarine missiles. That was a clear alternative, it was an alternative then, it is an alternative now. But the political judgment made by President Carter and later made by President Reagan and before him President Ford, was that the security of the country could be better served if we could have the independent vulnerability of both the ICBMs and the submarine missiles, in the event that we ever had a failure with one of those two.

YOUR CRITICS SAID THE SOVIETS COULD JUST BUILD MORE WARHEADS AND KNOCK OUT EVERY SHELTER WE HAD THERE. WAS THERE SUCH A RISK?

There is no system that we ever conceived of, or that anybody has ever conceived of, that could withstand an unlimited attack from ICBM warheads. That idea is hard for people to grasp at first, simply because it's hard to grasp the destructive power of 10,000 megatons brought down on the United States, or 20,000 megatons, or 30,000. Whatever system you would design, someone would up the ante and the level of attack that might be made against it. And indeed in some of the attack levels that were proposed, it got to the stage that the destructive force of the attack was so great that you could imagine barrage attacking the United States where it didn't matter where you have it deployed there, all areas of the United States would be in some sense destroyed by this attack. So it is not really technically feasible to design a system that can withstand an unlimited attack of megatonnage. Any system... any system has to have some relation to arms control. Has to have some relation to a parallel movement to on the one hand, what we were looking at then was simply trying to limit or control the ICBM attack. And then hopefully go beyond there to start reducing the level of ICBM threat. Ironically the, what has in more recent, in the Reagan Administration been considered a in a sense an alternative to trying to deal with the ICBM vulnerability problem, which is defend against an ICBM attack, an SDI system, the SDI system as well, if you look at it carefully, for its effectiveness, depends on arms control, depends on limiting to some extent the threat. If you can imagine, if you postulate an unlimited warhead attack, you can saturate or smother any defensive system, any SDI system. The difference in an SDI system is it may also be saturable with a decoy attack. It may not take unlimited number of warheads. There may be a combination of warheads and decoys which can saturate it.

ASKS ABOUT ARMS CONTROL

The fundamental idea which is difficult for people to grasp is that there is no way of providing a security for this country against an unlimited attack for ICBM. There is nothing you can do, either in terms of basing your ICBMs, defending against the attack, building shelters, building personnel shelters, against an unlimited ICBM attack. The country will be destroyed. And it is the beginning of wisdom to understand that and to realize there must be a political solution to the problem that goes in conjunction with the technical solution. It is the height of folly to believe that there is a pure technical solution to the problem proposed by 10,000 megatons of war, of nuclear warheads.

WAS HE SURPRISED BY UTAH'S VIOLENT REACTION TO SYSTEM?

Well I had a schedule to visit to Utah at the invitation of the governor of Utah. To participate in a debate on the MX which was to be held in the auditorium there in Salt Lake. Up until that point I had been advised by our Air Force people who were in Utah and dealing with the local people that Utah was...residents were very friendly to the Air Force and they would be very receptive to a deployment in Utah. I flew out to Salt Lake for the debate and when I arrived at the Salt Lake airport, I looked at the local newspaper which was in the airport, the Deseret News, and on the front page there was a big cartoon which is a map of the state of Utah and they had a large bullseye on the map and then they had "MX" in the middle of the bullseye. And that's when it dawned on me that the people of Utah were not going to be very receptive. Because there was a large and well orchestrated campaign to lead them to believe that if the system were deployed in Utah, they would become targets. They would be the first priority targets for an ICBM attack. Whereas if it were not deployed in Utah, they could somehow not be a target. They would somehow not be affected by nuclear war. The answer to that problem, the logical answer to it, but one which we were never successful in... in getting almost anybody to understand, is that the issue is not which state was attacked or which city was attacked, the issue was to provide a deterrence sufficiently that no one was attacked. Because if a nuclear war started, everybody was going to be endangered by it. In fact, the principle immediate threat from a nuclear attack on the shelters in Utah, would not be to the people in Salt Lake, it would be to the people in the Midwestern countries who were the victims of the fallout that the prevailing winds would carry from the west to the east, and that the danger to the people in Salt Lake came from our SAC bases in California. Because if they were attacked, then the fallout ban would pass over Salt Lake and that's where the danger would come. Of course, those bases already existed. But that was a complicated technical issue and it was hard to understand it. The overarching political point, though, was that the objective of each citizen should not have been how do I protect myself from a nuclear attack or even how do I protect my family, but how can I make the whole country, indeed the whole world, safe from a nuclear war. That was the point which we needed to make which we were unsuccessful in making.

CITES THE SACRIFICE THE UTAHANS SAW THEY WERE MAKING FOR THE REST OF THE NATION.

There were many arguments like that made. And I talked with many people in Utah at that time. I don't think any of those were anything more than noise in the system. The argument which really got through to them was the belief that if we installed the missile in Utah, they were going to become targets. That one got them at the gut level. They saw themselves and their families being held hostage to this missile deployment. And that there were going to be holes dug in the ground in the desert and roads built out there, a few people I am sure seriously and sincerely were concerned, but I think that was not the concern of the great bulk of the people in Utah.

One of the issues that was raised in Utah which as I said was a rationale, a secondary argument which was trying to generate support against the missile, but which is completely spurious, was the tremendous drain on water which the system would employ. And we did our best calculations on that and concluded that on an annual basis it would use about the same amount of water as it takes to water two or three golf courses. So it was down at that level. That's a lot of water. But it's down at that level of, at that level of compare... when you could compare it to issues of that sort, and then it put it down into more understandable terms. Instead of gallons of water per day or per month.

WERE WE TRYING TO BEAT SOVIETS AT THEIR OWN GAME—COULD WE HAVE KEPT THEM FROM KNOWING WHICH SHELTER THE MISSILE WAS IN?

A big unanswered question about the MX was whether we could have maintained the security of the deception in the face of a determined Soviet espionage effort. And one can never know. This is an, we live in an open society. There is no way, no real way of keeping Soviet agents out of Utah. There is... we could convince ourselves that it was going to be very difficult to try to, if not impossible to break the system technically. But there was never any way of knowing whether some agent could get a hold of the deployment plans on a day-to-day basis. And keep track of them that way. So that was always a risk. It was a risk one, that the plans envisioned dealing with by injecting randomness into it. So that the plans, so that the deployment schemes were never known by more than one person per base, and that they would change in a random way not in a planned or determined way. So that if you got the plans for one day it wouldn't help you any the next day.

ASKS ABOUT DASH CAPABILITY

The... the dash capability is an often misunderstood aspect of the MX. It is a... it's a secondary feature, one that really didn't have to do with the... was not related to the fundamental purpose of the MX. The MX system which was called a dash system or a mobile system or some people called it a racetrack system, all of those are, either didn't exist in the system as it was finally determined or they were secondary to it. The main feature of the multiple protective shelter MX as it was finally designed was like the very first proposal that the Defense Science Board made. It was to make an awful lot of shelters and a relatively few missiles and then one would base the missiles in the shelters and just leave them there. They wouldn't be dashed around. And maybe once every couple of months, when they would come out for maintenance say, when they went back, instead of going to the same shelter, they would go to a different shelter. That was the way it was to be maintained. It was proposed. But in order to move them around to maintenance and back into the shelter, they wanted, had... very large and complex carriages, moving the missile. And it was proposed that these, that the missiles themselves, could be moved rapidly in an alert, if there was any... thought there was any danger of the compromise, the way they were located. And that concept of dashing which was a dubious feature of the system, at all times I thought, and was never a fundamental feature of the system, somehow came to be fixed in people's minds as the way the system operated. But the, it was not envisioned at any time in the design of the system, that the dashing was a fundamental or even an important part of the system.

ASKS ROLE OF OTHER EXPERTS WHO CAME IN TO ADVISE IN UTAH.

Well there were, for every system that was proposed for the deployment of the MX, there was an is a host of detractors. Some of them were detractors because they would not have liked the MX in any kind of a deployment. And so they, whatever deployment was being proposed was the one they were against. Others were opposed because they had a quote better way of deploying it and they wanted, they were unhappy that the world could not see the virtues of their particular way of deployment. In the case of the Garwin proposal, it was the latter. And Garwin was not opposed to MX per se. He understood fully and completely the... the problems of the threat posed by the improved guidance on the SS-18. His idea was... but he had conceived of a different solution to the problem. Which was known as the small submarine, which was to put the missiles in submarines and the first answer to why does that differ from Tridents? What's fundamentally different from that, and his answer was, oh, we'll keep these submarines close to shore, and therefore we can devise a communication system to them which is like the communication system that the ICBM has. Now. Every new idea like that that was proposed, after it had been around for a few months, people would discover some of the warts on that approach, and that was true of the submarine-based ICBMs as well. But the fundamental point, my fundamental reason for not supporting Garwin's submarine approach, was not because of any particular technical difficulties with it, although it had a set of them, but because I did not see what it truly added to the submarine capability we already had. That it had a different communication mode it was true, but I didn't consider that it... that the difference in communication mode at this, an important reason for going to the ground ICBMs in the first place. So that was only, that was an answer to a problem which in my mind wasn't the problem we were trying to solve.

ASKS HIS EXPERIENCE IN SALT LAKE CITY, THE DEBATE.

Well the MX debate in Utah was not something I would have volunteered to do, even if I hadn't known how it was going to turn out. But as I said, when I got to Salt Lake and saw the, and saw the cartoon in the Deseret News, I knew we were going to be for a very unpleasant evening. But it was something that had to be done and I was as good a person to do it as any I guess. The later, a few days after that we spent in Utah were much more positive, that is the going around the given towns, specific towns in Utah, Provo and Delta and meeting with citizens' groups in those towns and talking with them in smaller groups, not televised, not on the air, nobody was speaking for dramatic effect, people were really trying to exchange information. And those meetings went, went very much better. But the auditorium meeting in Salt Lake was a... not exactly the highpoint of my career.

DID THE AIR FORCE MAKE THE MISTAKES?

I am hard pressed to criticize the Air Force's approach to public relations in Utah. On balance, it's clear it was not successful. I am not sure that there is anything that could have been done that would have been successful. So I... if I had had a better approach to the problem, then I would have proposed it to them and helped them execute it. I saw then and I still see it in retrospect, it's a very difficult problem. Maybe even an unsolvable problem. Part of the problem was that the conservative forces in that state which were very strong for an MX missile, up until the time we proposed putting it in their state, all of a sudden started finding reasons for not being in favor of it. I had testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee for the first two years when I was in office about why we didn't have an MX under an intensive deployment, and why we didn't have a solution to the SS-18 guidance underway. And one of the most harshest critics of the Administration and General Meehan in particular of not having their program underway, was Senator Garn from Utah. And right up until the time we proposed putting it into Utah, he was one of the strongest advocates of the MX. But his support was nowhere to be found when it actually came to that proposal. All of the political support vanished when it became clear that there was no support in the state politically.

ASKS WHY CRITICS BLAMED SALT.

No, they were wrong. Van Cleave and other people who wanted an MX-like system, they wanted the solution to the SS-18 guidance problem, but thought that there was a simple, cheap, easy solution to the problem, were just wrong. It is true that we could have gotten a solution to the problem using Minuteman. It would not have been simple or cheap. It would have been different. It's also true that we could have built the MX as a smaller missile. That would not have been cheap, any cheaper or any simpler. It would just have been different. It was, we spent enough time in enough different Administrations working on that problem to know that there are no simple, cheap simple solutions to it. And the fundamental problem was as I said before we were trying to protect against 10,000 megatons of warheads and it's a very formidable problem. Now this may not have been, and I don't mean to be defensive about that solution. It was the least ugly solution, the least unelegant solution that we were able to come across in the years we spent on it. And I have no great affection for it. But to this day I have not seen a better solution. When the Reagan Administration came into office the first thing they did was to cancel the multiple protective shelter on the theory that they would quickly come to a simple, clean, inexpensive solution to the problem. Not constrained by SALT. It turned out that taking away the SALT constraint didn't make the problem any simpler. And they have now been seven years trying to find this Holy Grail. This simple solution to the problem. The latest version of it is they'll put the MX on railroad trains and that solution looked very good to people for the first few months until they started digging into its problems and it may or may not be approved by the Congress, but it's a solution which has the same set of problems and the same set of flaws as all the other solutions. So looking for a good solution is simply posing yourself an impossible problem. As I said, all we were able to do in the time we spent on it was to come up with the least ugly solution.

WITH ALL THESE CRITICS, WHAT KILLED THE BASING MODE?

It's quite clear that the... well the basing mode was approved by the Carter Administration and by the Congress and was funded and was funded and was proceeding. What killed the MX multiple protective shelter basing mode is that the Reagan Administration cancelled it when they came into office, thinking that they would have a different solution and a better solution in another few months. Seven years later they still don't have that solution. But that's another story. But it was quite clear what, what killed it, what caused the major problems of selling it in the first place was the lack of conservative support because they saw that it must be bad because it is compatible with SALT and SALT's bad. What finally officially and formally killed it was that the Reagan Administration to office and they exerted their prerogative of office and cancelled the program.

ASKS ABOUT SOVIET FEARS THIS LOOKED TO THEM LIKE A FIRST STRIKE WEAPON.

The issue of whether the MX is a first strike weapon, that is a weapon which can be used to attack another person's silos... I don't like the term first strike because I don't think the MX in any version is truly a first strike weapon. But it can be a counter missile weapon. It can be a missile used to attack other missile silos. But even in that mode it is only a serious consideration when you have enough of them deployed. It had nothing to do with what kind of a basing mode the system is in. Whether you put them in... multiple protective shelters or a mobile system. The basing mode doesn't relate to the extent to which it can be used for a counter battery missile. The... what does relate to it are two factors. Number one is the accuracy. And it's the same argument being used against Trident II that was used against MX. And the second argument and which is really the important, the fundamental one is, how many of them can you deploy? Now our thought in this, in the late '70s when we were doing this analysis, was that this missile was not additive to the Minuteman missile. It would be used to replace Minuteman missile. And then we would keep a constant number of missiles in the force. Namely 2000 warheads. And that if we could get some agreement with the Soviets on SALT, we would reduce that number down to 1000. And whether those 2000 warheads were a combination of Minuteman II and III, or whether they were MXs, were not nearly so important as to how many there were. And that the way to get that threat removed, was to take that number from 2000 to 1000 and that the impetus to go from 2000 to 1000 would be if we could get the Soviets to remove their threat to our ICBMs by reducing the SS-18s from 2000 warheads down to a number like 1000.Many people believed and some people clearly articulated that the primary reason for putting the accuracy in the MX and going for the full 2000 warheads was to force the Soviets hand on getting a reduction in the threat posed to us by theSS-18. That if we did not take that move, we would never have any leverage in getting them to reduce their threat with the SS-18 missile.

WHAT THEN WOULD BE ITS TARGETS?

The question of what targets the MX have is a complicated question for which it is not a really simple answer and depending on a host of scenarios that could be considered. But at the risk of oversimplifying and overgeneralizing, they would be hardened military targets. There would be no great point to using the SS-18 to... I mean, or in the Soviet case or the MX in the US case, to attack cities. The accuracy is wasted in that application. So it would be used to attack hardened military targets. The... our targeting planners and I am sure the Soviet targeting planners as well, have a very long list of targets which they would think would be appropriate for that. They would include not only ICBM shelters but would include command bunkers, they would include some tactical military targets. As I said there is a very long list. The question which is very often focused on is one class of those targets which are other ICBM shelters and the question is asked, what is the point of attacking another ICBM shelter when the other side, recognizing the attack is underway, would fire out from under the attack? And that's a very good argument. The only purpose that I could adduce for targeting ICBM shelters in a retaliatory strike which is what we envision, if we were ever in a war, we would be involved in, is simply to not give the other side the option of holding back some of his missiles for a second wave and third wave attacks. For any... being able to destroy in shelter any such missiles that he has held back or for not being able to reload. We don't know but what the Soviets may have second and third missiles available to load and reload silo after the first one has been fired. Having said all of that, let me say that I don't find this whole arcane analysis of targeting, retargeting, re-retargeting, very compelling. The system is fundamentally a deterrent system and the reason then for the accuracy and the prompt response to the extent there is a reason for it, is to convince the Soviets that one whole class of targets which are important to them will be as much subjected to attack in the case of a war, as would be their cities.

QUESTION ABOUT REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

When the Scowcroft Commission was convened in '83 to look at the ICBM vulnerability problem and what to do about it, it was convened by the President as the result of a frustration at not being able to get a satisfactory basing mode for the MX missile. Having gone through three or four new designs — having first of all cancelled the multiple protective shelter, then gone through three or so new designs, each of which had been turned down by the Congress as being inadequate, he was frustrated at this point. And he convened the Commission to tell him what to do about the problem. I think there was a fair amount of... well, there was a wide, a really very diverse set of people on that Commission, some of whom had had some experience with the... MX problem, like myself and like Gen. Scowcroft. And I think the people who were experienced with the problem had some sense of frustration that the solution to the problem which had been at hand at one time had been dropped. And that no new solution had been found. Others in the Commission had really not been working on the problem, involved with the problem before. So it was an entirely new issue to them.

HOW DID HE FEEL TO BE ON A COMMISSION THAT SAYS WHAT HE HAS FELT WAS A PROBLEM WAS AGAIN NOT A PROBLEM? THE MISSILES WOULD JUST GO BACK IN SILOS.

The... The reason that I was even willing to go on the panel was, I was most concerned that we try to get the, both the public debate and the Administration view of this problem in perspective. Because far more important to me than the three years of not building or deploying a system was that the rhetoric and debate during that three year period, which suggested that we did not have a deterrence system in the country because we did not have an MX. So to be concerned about the, having an MX system built and deployed, as I was, was one thing, but to represent that the country was in danger of attack or that we didn't have a deterrence because we didn't have an MX was quite another thing. And I thought that was a dangerous view and an incorrect view. And that one thing that the Commission could do was to put that problem in its proper perspective. And I think indeed that the Commission was successful in doing that. The rhetoric which had been used both during the campaign in 19, in the pre-campaign period, in '79 and '80, and during the first few years of the Administration was that a window of vulnerability existed. That between and at least as originally defined, the window of vulnerability was referring to a time period. And it was a time period after which the SS-18 with its accurate guidance was deployed, and before which we had an invulnerable ICBM deployed which could resist an attack by it. That was the original definition of the window of vulnerability. It came later to be enlarged to mean many other things. The ... As I have already described to you, I recognized that there was a problem proposed by that SS-18 deployment. But to suggest that the country was vulnerable to surprise attack because of that was quite another matter. It was potentially vulnerable, if, if, and if... and the if's that had to occur had not occurred. There had to be a complete political breakdown, there had to be a... a... a lack, there had to be a loss of the, of the invulnerability or there had to be an emergence of vulnerability of our submarine missiles. There had to be some reason why our bombers wouldn't be effective. There had to be a whole host of improbable events happen—none of which had happened. And so we didn't really have, we were not really susceptible to an attack, and it was misleading and dangerous to think that we were. One thing that the Scowcroft Commission did and in my judgment the most important thing that they did, was that they did put their problem in perspective, and said, "We are concerned about modernizing our ICBM forces, but we are concerned because we are looking at some future set of contingencies. That the window of vulnerability doesn't exist and the reason it doesn't exist is because we have many components in our strategic nuclear weapons besides the ICBM. And in particular we have a very strong, very capable force of nuclear weapons at sea in our submarines. In addition to that we had a bomber force, and by the time the Scowcroft Commission was meeting, we also had the first few wings of cruise missiles being deployed. We had indeed an awesome force of nuclear missiles, not even counting our ICBMs. So the major thing that the Scowcroft Commission did was to put that in perspective. And they said, not only do we have this very large force, but the difficulty of attacking more than one component of that force at any one time is almost insuperable. That even if the Soviets can attack our ICBMs and even if they could figure out a way of attacking some of our submarines, they can't figure out a way of attacking both of them at the same time. And the attack on one is essentially going to trigger a response from the other. That perspective then which was badly needed and the problem the Scowcroft Commission gave, it said there is nothing, we should not be complacent about the fact that the Soviets have made this move with the SS-18. We should take a variety of moves to try to counter it. Some of which would involve modernizing our own ICBM force and making it less vulnerable. And the other, which involved an... in many ways a more important component of that, is a move to arms control to reduce the threat. And we did con... explicitly concede in the report that these two are related. That it may be important, that the bargaining chip concept in this case at least probably had some validity. That if we had an SS-18 equivalent type missile, that we would probably get the Soviet's attention in a much more effective way in getting them to reduce their SS-18 deployment.

DID YOU WISH IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN POLITICALLY ACCEPTABLE THEN TO PUT THE MXS IN SILOS?

No. I believed then and I still believe that the single most important criterion of performance of any of our, of our nuclear weapons, is their survivability. Much more important than their performance, their striking power. Much more important than all the other performance. Therefore, any time we were designing a new system, I would make that the first objective we were trying to achieve with that system. And I would be willing to settle for half as many in order to get that enhanced survivability that came with mobility. Mobility comes at a pretty high price. But, as I say, you can pay for that by not building as many or deploying as many. So, I would always favor of an exchange of enhanced survivability against almost anything else we're doing with our nuclear weapons. Having said that, I would still say that I did not... I still don't believe that the ... present force of MX missiles, of Minuteman missiles we have, is truly vulnerable to attack. They are vulnerable in vacuo, as they sit there by themselves. But they don't exist in vacuo, they exist in a complex of other nuclear weapons and therefore I think it is unreasonable to believe that they would ever be attacked. So when we are talking about modernizing the ICBM force to get improved survivability, we are anticipating problems ten, fifteen, twenty years in the future. And simply recognizing that it takes ten years to build a system, we're trying to prepare for the future.

ASKS ABOUT MIDGETMAN—WHY COULDN'T HE SUPPORT IT IN HIS TIME IN THE PENTAGON?

An alternative... In modernizing the ICBM force, the single most important criterion as I said is the survivability. To get that survivability you almost have to go to some form of mobility. And the smaller the missile is, the easier it is able to do that. We were pushing, in, during the Carter Administration, I was pushing for going from a basically a 200,000 pound missile to less than a 100,000 pound... to about a 100,000 pound missile, for those reasons. There was no reason you couldn't push it all the way down to 30 or 40,000 pounds and go for a single warhead missile, which is the Midgetman. That is simply carrying that argument to its logical conclusion. The reasons for not pushing it in that direction are the cost per warhead. It is much more expensive in a single system than in a multiple system. But that's a, that's an argument on the margin, that's not a fundamental argument. The reason in favor of going to a single warhead is that you have gone to the limit in making this single target as unattractive as possible, because it takes at least one, and with any confidence, two warheads to attack that one warhead. And therefore, if you can control the number of warheads being deployed, you have made this the extreme, extremely unattractive target. But there again it depends on there being an arms control regime going on in parallel with the modernization. It assumes that you're going to be controlling the number of warheads used against it. If you're willing to imagine an unlimited number of warheads attacking Midgetman, then it is a very easy system to attack and swamp. If you try to beat that by making it mobile, then you make a very, very expensive system, and that's the dilemma which the Air Force is faced with today on the Midgetman. They're trying to get both the unattractive target by making it a single warhead, and the invulnerability against an unlimited attack, by making it mobile. And the consequence then, you end up with not just 100 or 150 or 200 even mobile missiles, you can end of 500 or 1000 to get any, any substantial force. And that's a very expensive deployment.

WOULD HE RECOMMEND JUST PUTTING SINGLE MISSILES IN SILOS AND NOT MAKING THEM MOBILE?

Putting the Midgetman missile in a silo doesn't really benefit one much beyond the Minuteman. On the other hand, as I pointed out before, the Minuteman... the chemicals in the Minuteman are wearing out, the missile is simply becoming obsolete. And so in time it will have to be replaced. One thing that could be done is simply to replace the Midgetman... I mean the Minuteman with the Midgetman on a silo-for-silo deployment. And that does deal with the fact that the chemicals are wearing out. It neither adds to nor subtracts from the vulnerability equation. It would mean that if you did that, the vulnerability or that the invulnerability of the ICBMs, now the Midgetmans, is going to have to be assured by the submarine forces. They would not have an independent ... or they would have to be assured by a very tight agreement to reduce the number of missiles that could be used to attack warheads. Of those two I favor the latter. That is, I think it is...if we can move towards, first towards a START and then towards a further reduction from START, so that we can reduce the number of, of warheads that both sides have, then there are not so many excess warheads that could be used in a multiple, many on one attack, on other ICBMs. Or to put it another way, if... if we have 500 ICBM warheads and the Soviets have 500 ICBM warheads, and they elect to use their 500 to attack our 500, it... it gains then nothing in any, in any military or strategic equation. And so from that concept they are not attractive targets. But the key then is reducing the number of warheads that both sides have. So that that does not, and that's an alternative to the expensive, very expensive program, to have taken those single missiles and moving them around on vans.

SOME PEOPLE WANT BOTH SIDES TO HAVE SECURE, INVULNERABLE MISSILES TO MAKE A SAFER WORLD. OTHERS SAY WE ARE ALSO DETERRING BY THE THREAT OF FIRST USE CONVENTIONAL WAR SO WE MUST PUT THEM AT MORE RISK THAN THEY CAN PUT US. ARE THESE DIFFERENT VIEWS?

I think the... in the world in which we live today the most we can expect our nuclear systems... our nuclear missiles to do for us is to deter an attack by the Soviet's nuclear missiles. That is, deterrence of a like system, deterrence of an ICBM against an ICBM attack, an SOBM against an SOBM attack, that's something which we can reasonably expect those systems to do. So we can use then to keep ourselves from being forced into a nuclear war. And that's deterrence at that level. It would be ... there was a time when our, these systems had what were called extended deterrence, that is the threat of nuclear retaliation was so strong, and so powerful and so compelling, that they could also deter the Soviets from doing other things, from using their armored forces from going into Europe. There is still today some, some extended deterrence capability in those forces. How much no one really knows. It's in their imagination and our imagination. And it's really impossible to know how effective it is. It's always something they would have to calculate. And worry about. And so to that extent, extended deterrence is real. It's quite clear that it, it's never been effective in deterring them from various Third World adventures which we would like to have discouraged them from doing. So it has never been a deterrence at that level.

YET SCOWCROFT AND CARTER MADE THAT ARGUMENT: WE NEEDED THE MX PARTLY FOR PERCEPTION THAT IT WAS AN ADDED INCENTIVE FOR SOVIETS TO HOLD BACK.

Yes that's. There are many people who believe in extended deterrence and I certainly believe that there is some element of extended deterrence in our nuclear missiles, as they are deployed today. I, I do not believe that that's the primary reason that they are deployed. I think the primary reason they are deployed is to deter the Soviets from making a nuclear attack against the United States. But I do believe there is a residual extended deterrence capability in all of our nuclear missiles and whatever benefit we can get out of them we should get out of them. The question is whether you should design your forces to try and maximize the extended deterrence and I don't believe you should. That leads you to a different kind of force competition, much more expensive, much more complex. It drives you to a set of... of actions which, which are complex and expensive but with the results that are dubious. That is, the results are the extent to which they add more to that extended deterrence than you already have simply residual with your other deployment.

DO WE NEED ANOTHER 50 MX?

The whole question of how many MXs should be employed is intimately tied in with what we do in our arms control talks. I would hope that we could have enough success in START that it would not be necessary to build and deploy another 50 MX. In fact, if we succeed in START, even in the proposals which are already on the table, that will drive us to a small enough number of land-based ICBMs that the question of, of adding new MXs I think will become somewhat academic. But we don't have that START agreement yet and so I certainly would keep open the option of building another 50 or another 100 until I had achieved some real success in the reduction of those strategic weapons. But a reduction is a far... a bilateral reduction is a far more desirable alternative.